Wolf Called to Washington Second Time in Two Weeks to Testify on Voucher Program

University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf has been asked to testify tomorrow, March 1, at a House of Representatives hearing in Washington on reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a federal voucher program that awards scholarships for students to attend private schools in the nation’s capital.

Wolf, who holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in School Choice, will speak at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Health Care, District of Columbia, Census and National Archives. The hearing is scheduled to start at 8:30 a.m. CST, and video may be viewed on the committee’s Web site at House Committee website while it is in session.

Wolf led a team of researchers that performed a six-year experimental evaluation of the school voucher program for the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. In the final report released last June, the researchers found that the program had a clear positive impact on the high school graduation rates of participants, raising them 21 percentage points if a student used a voucher. The test score impact of the program was less clear, in the final analysis, as some evidence suggested modest gains in reading for voucher students but there was no evidence of impact in math.

Last month, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, introduced bills to revive the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which Democrats did not permanently reauthorize in the last Congress. Wolf testified before the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Feb. 16.